Day night cricket at Manuka Oval. A review of sorts

An afternoon and evening sitting on the grass on the hill with friends and a very great amount of beer.

The lights at Manuka were magnificent.

Sadly the catering was not up to scratch with the beer lines ($6 for mid strength) long and slow.

Astonishingly at one point they managed to run out of bread rolls without running out of kranskys which is a rookie error of huge proportions.

Security was also, in my view, heavy handed with at least one friend booted out seemingly for no greater crime than constructing a hat from a beer tray (we smuggled him back in through another door).

(I’d like to note I personally had no interactions at all with security. Although they did confiscate our beer snake because apparently it looked like too much fun.)

The ticketing was also a shambles with the systems not at all in place to handle the plethora of e-tickets (you can’t tear the end off a punter’s phone). People turned away for lack of a ticket would not be thrilled to learn others just walked in without any ticket at all.

So management has a very great deal to improve.

But it just doesn’t matter.

Because watching cricket by night at Manuka Oval is magical.

If you want to hear about the game Foxsports have this:

But for a more crowd-centric take on proceedings here’s something I knocked up:

I had a good time too. Nathan Lyon even popped (near)by for a chat, which was nice and attracted a bit of a crowd. Turns out he was keen to play in the match, but commented along the lines of “I wanted to play in this match, but Julia didn’t pick me. Perhaps we need to vote for someone else.”